The V2MOM: One Page to Run Your Business

One of my favorite shows of all time is MASH. I used to record the episodes on VHS for my mom and we’d watch them all. It was so good. There was one scene I remember where there was a life insurance salesman preying on the GIs and he was roundly mocked, as you would expect, but he had a line that I always remember and use often with my clients: “We don’t plan to fail, we fail to plan!”

That remains true for startups. All too often, there is no written artifact of what we are actually trying to do with the business. What choices are we making? What is our actual strategy and how do we know what to say no to? A lot of early-stage founders have it in their head (sorta) and assume that everyone else knows what they want from them because they think they’ve said it lots of times.

But regular readers know that just because YOU know what you want, your team is not necessarily on the same page. One page.

This shows up when the team feels inefficient and scattered and the CEO is getting frustrated because things are not going super well.

I will ask “Have you written down your strategy?”

All too often, the answer is “no.”

So I say, let’s write a V2MOM.

Since October 2025, it has come up in more than sixty of my sessions. It is the most common homework I give. Let’s see what it is and how to write one.

First, credit where it belongs

I did not invent this. Marc Benioff did, at the start of Salesforce.[1] They wrote their first one on a single page, and the same format still drives the company. Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures. V2MOM.

Here’s the framework.

Clarity, Focus, and Urgency

My holy trinity. I say these three words in every meeting I’m in, and the V2MOM is how you get all three onto one page.

Clarity is what we are trying to do. Crisp clarity on the priorities, the mountaintop, what’s important to us and how we’re going to get there. Vision and Values live here. And clarity is a two-way street. It’s not just what you say, but how people internalize it. Making sure they understand what’s important to you and the kind of company you want to build is a third of your job, and you do it by repeating it over and over.

Focus is prioritization. The strategy and the plan, and what we’re doing to move the needle on the thing that matters most. This is what we care about. Methods live here, in rank order of importance.

Urgency is dates, times, and numbers. Speed is everything in this world, and urgency is how you stop giving it away. Every measure gets a number and a date. Then it’s Monday, something is red, and you know where you’re going to spend your time today. Measures live here. And, you have to adhere to these ruthlessly.

Check your own page against all three. Can you say in a sentence what we are trying to do? Do the methods tell you what to do first? Does every measure have a number and a date? If you can’t say yes to all three, you’re not done.

Why I use it

Because it fits on one page. Two at the outside.

Because the methods are in rank order. If you don’t know which thing to do first, look at the page.

And because it settles arguments. If it’s on the page, it matters. If it isn’t, it doesn’t. A lot of company drama goes away when everybody can see the same sheet of paper.

I’m not an OKR guy. I’ve never actually seen them work well. There is so much overhead with OKRs and people learn to game them.

Is V2MOM perfect? No. V2MOMs are the worst, except for all the other ones. Pick one and build the muscle.

The five parts

Vision (clarity). One or two sentences. What are we trying to accomplish? If you hit it, you would know. Leave the numbers out. They go in Measures.

Here’s what a good one sounds like, from Tollbeam, an accounts payable software company for restaurant groups and one of the fictional companies in the companion post, Three V2MOM Examples: “By the end of 2027, Tollbeam is the way restaurant groups pay their suppliers, and the obvious choice for a Series B.” A destination and a year. No numbers. Anyone in the company can read it and know whether a decision moves them closer.

Values (clarity). How we behave and what we trade off when it gets hard. Three to five, specific enough to settle a decision.

This is where the stuff that drives you crazy goes. If you are suffering every week watching rough drafts go out as final work, don’t make it a personality problem. Put it on the page. “Good enough is not good enough” is a value. Now the standard belongs to the company, and you stop being the one who is crazy.

Methods (focus). The things we are going to do. Not a laundry list.[2] Three to five buckets, in rank order, each one a plain action that starts with a verb.

If you could only do one, you’d do the first. That’s focus: what matters most, and everything else waits.

Here’s a good one, also from Tollbeam: “Win the multi-location restaurant groups. That’s where we already win. Say no to the single-location shop and the national chain this year.” It starts with a verb, and it says who we are not chasing. That’s the hard part of focus, and now it’s on the page where everyone can see it. No numbers in the method. The “how many” belongs in the measures.

One test I use: a method is an action, and a number is a measure. If a method has a number in it, move the number to Measures. I see it all the time. Five methods, and one of them is really the revenue goal with a verb in front of it. That’s the scorecard, so it moves to Measures.

Obstacles. What could get in the way. Be honest. Market turns, key hires, a customer that is too big a share of revenue, the fact that we move so fast we forget to tell each other what we decided.

Check your obstacles for a method nobody wrote down. “We don’t have the operational infrastructure to scale” is an obstacle with no owner. If the plan to fix it is big enough to need its own line, promote it to a method: build the operational infrastructure to scale. Either way, every obstacle gets an owner and a plan.

Measures (urgency). How we know we won. This is your scorecard, and it should feed straight into your dashboard.

Put a number and a date on every measure. Some measures are a number to hit, and some are done or not done by a date. Both need a date. And don’t bet the page on one number. Pair the result you want with a guardrail, a second number that keeps it honest. And name what each measure proves: a method, the vision, or the guardrail. If you have an annual number, make it divisible by twelve to get a month, and the month divisible by four to get a week. Then Monday morning can tell you, in color, where you stand: it’s the 18th, we’re sixty percent through the month, and we’re at forty-eight percent to target. Now you know where today goes.

It makes you decide

I tell every CEO the same thing before they start. The V2MOM isn’t magic. But the discipline of writing down your vision, your values, your methods, and your measures forces you to make the decisions you have been deferring.

Most CEOs already have the pieces. Putting them on one page is the work.

That’s also why I push the CEO to write it, instead of handing it to the chief of staff or to me. If you don’t write it, you are still the operating system, and you know how that goes. You are the one lying awake at night wondering what you forgot.

Where it goes wrong

I’ve watched this fail five ways.

The generic page. A single company V2MOM so broad nobody can use it. The fix is a cascade. Same vision and values for everyone. Each leader writes their own methods, obstacles, and measures that tie back to the company page. Now the head of sales and the head of product can both point at something real.

The page nobody owns. It never feels urgent, so it keeps getting bumped. Without it, you get founders with slightly different versions of the strategy, and a team that can tell. Pick an owner and a date. It doesn’t fix itself.

The perfect page. Don’t overthink it. If you have the pieces in your head, spend twenty minutes talking it out loud, to me or to Claude or to a voice memo, and let it come back as a draft. Then edit. I am a very good editor. I’d rather edit a rough draft than wait for a perfect one.

The slow page. Fast teams worry that structure will slow them down, and they’re right. That’s why it’s one page. A binder built for a company ten times your size would.

The filed page. You wrote it, you loved it, it lives in a folder. A V2MOM only works if you look at it. Quarterly review at a minimum.

Where it fits in the week

The V2MOM sets the year. Everything else is how you live it.

Annual goals divide into quarters, quarters into months, months into weeks. The page you wrote in January turns into the dashboard, and the dashboard turns into the Monday meeting, where every number has a name and a color next to it. On Friday, the Friday update closes the loop and tells everyone what happened and what matters next.

The V2MOM answers what we are trying to do and in what order. Monday asks what a great week looks like. Friday asks whether we got one.

Skip the page and Monday becomes a status meeting.

The full weekly rhythm is in why your company needs an operating system, the Friday update template every CEO should steal, and why you should send Friday updates.

Why this works

Clarity. Everyone can see what we’re trying to do and why, on one page.

Focus. The methods are ranked, so people know what matters most. If it’s not on the page, we aren’t doing it. That is a gift to your team. They want to know what not to work on.

Urgency. Every measure has a number and a date, the numbers show up on Monday, and you find out in a week, not a quarter.

The V2MOM is where all three start.

Your turn

Next up: a few fictional V2MOMs, the same way I did it for Friday updates. Every company invented, every move real.

In the meantime, write yours. Then reply and tell me which part was hardest to put on the page. My bet is the rank order.

If you like this, please let me know. Share it, comment below, etc..

I read every response.